Importance of Goals & Benchmarks
We have lived and learned from this quote, “Having a clear, compelling goal mobilizes your focus toward actionable behavior.” We found it on Forbes.com in an article titled 5 Reasons Why Goal Setting Will Improve Your Focus.
Back in the day, before we started making clear goals for our company, we felt like we were swimming around wondering when our next client was going to come and wondering how financially we were doing. This is no way to run a company and we cannot even begin to explain how much goal making has changed our workflow and ease of mind.
What type of goals?
Having clear goals allows you to focus the direction of the company both financially and aspirationally. Start big, think 5 years ahead and how your company can make an impact, and then move smaller and smaller to what you should be doing each week. We would make goals all the time, but there was no focus or data to back up the goal. We have to give a huge shout out to Cultivate Advisors for giving us a breakthrough consultation. They pushed us to think that in order to achieve the larger goals, you need to think back to what sort of practices you should be doing every week or day to reach those monthly, yearly, and 5-year goals.
We were already making goals and planning client acquisitions before but after working with their team we were MUCH much more focused. Honestly, we started to think about our goals first as financial. This helped contextualize everything. We started with how much we want to make and what amount we wanted to be saving, and we were able to project all the way forward to how many quotes we should be getting a week and how many projects that actually transferred per month.
Aside from financially, we had –and have– some big goals for where we want to be as a company. We want an office, we want more people on our team, and we want to make some bigger impacts with our talents on the community. And I’m sure you know it does not happen overnight, so you need a plan for how to get there.
Admin Time
When does all this get done?? We also made time each week to focus on, well, goals. We now take time on Mondays to have some “admin” time to reflect on the company, see how we are doing, and make changes to our existing goals. Since starting that, we feel we are able to really see how the work we have been doing pays off and makes us more eager to keep up this style of working. Of course, some Mondays don’t work out, but that is ok.
So go out there and conquer the world on goal at a time! You got this! And plus, once you achieve a goal, you can check it off which feels amazing!
